The search took him to a database kept in Holland on airborne units. In the case of a commando uniform, it took him to the soldier’s widow in Omaha, Neb.

World War II war correspondent army uniform

(For more information on a pictured item, click on the image.)

Tracking down those stories is for Hughes as important as obtaining the items. In fact, it is more important. “The items removed from their history just don’t interest me,” he said. “These people sacrificed, and their stories shouldn’t be scattered to the winds.”

While Hughes is an eclectic collector of Americana—from vintage electric guitars and clothing to pottery and furniture—militaria hold a special place. “Every item has a story, for a chair it maybe how it was made, why a particular wood was used,” Hughes said, “but with a piece of militaria, you have a piece of history.”

The material itself can tell tales. American gear was basic, while the German equipment was finely made. “We looked like we were going to change the oil,” Hughes said. “The Germans looked like they were going to march down Main Street. We were very utilitarian. That’s why we won.”

Hughes’ first collectible was a helmet liner he got as a birthday present. As a boy, he donned the liner and stormed the beaches of Normandy in his backyard. Since then, militaria and the stories they hold have been a continuing pursuit for Hughes. In 2000, Chris started Rally Point Militaria online, which is rich in both military collectibles and stories.

1940s U.S. Navy midshipman hat

Sometimes, Hughes is searching for stories that even family members have never heard as in the case of getting the material in the footlocker of World War I machine gunner. The veteran’s son told Hughes his father had only spoken to him once about the war. Hughes’ research was able to fill in details, such as the man being wounded in a gas attack on Nov. 1, 1918. In turn, the family offered details about the man Hughes said he could never get from just picking up items in an auction or military show.

The stories, memorabilia and the Internet are fueling interest in militaria. “This is a growing market, an international market,” Hughes observed. “Right now, I am getting a lot of interest in Vietnam stuff from people in Poland and Japan who don’t really have any link to the war.” Speculation isn’t a good reason to get into the market, Hughes cautioned, but he noted, “Militaria outperforms the S&P index. There are some pieces that appreciate 15 percent a year.”

Vietnam War MK2 Conetta bayonet fighting knife

Korean/Vietnam wars M7 bayonet for M16 rifle

As compelling as the militaria market is, Hughes said, every collectible group has its stories and challenges. “The vintage guitar has everything to do with rock ’n’ roll,” Hughes said. “It says little about innovation because most musicians would agree that older is better for tone and feel.” When it comes to vintage clothes, he said, it “has to do with nostalgia and earlier romanticized times . . . vintage jeans are cooler than new jeans.”

1960s wool cape

Vintage lace dress

Hughes, who is known to friends as “the Treasure Hunter,” is constantly on the lookout for it all and for the stories that come with each collectible. “In a way, it is like a jigsaw puzzle,” Hughes said. “At home, I’ve got a lot of jigsaw puzzles, and I hope I can put in more pieces.”

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1840 Japanese vase

Christopher Kent walked into the “Gray Goose,” a Charleston, S.C., junk shop piled with debris and dust. “There were flea-bitten, 1950s armchairs that should have been given a good burial,” Kent said. “It was the sort of place that makes you want to disinfect yourself when you leave, frankly, just my sort of place.”

But two small panels—no more than 3 inches by 10 inches—hanging on a back wall drew his attention. Kent took them to the rotund proprietor, who said, “Don’t you just love Japanese art?”

After a quick negotiation that brought the price for the pair down to $15 from $25, Kent walked out with two 17th-century Russian triptych panels worth about $1,000.

From the junk shop to international auction houses and major museums, Worthologist Christopher Kent has used that keen eye to spot value in everything from Japanese porcelain to Italian decorative arts and everything in between.

“I am a generalist,” Kent explained. “A generalist has the ability to walk into a room filled with items and be able to say something about every piece. There are really only a handful of people who can do that.”

Walking encyclopedia

How does one become a walking encyclopedia of antiques and fine arts?

For Kent, it started with his grandparents who were both ardent collectors—his paternal grandmother was a textile expert and his grandfather, her husband, a collector of American furniture. “These were serious collectors who would go without dinner or lunch to acquire a piece.” Kent said he inherited both their interest and their collecting “genetic flaw.”

At the age of 6, he started his own collection with an 18th-century Japanese porcelain bowl given to him by a family friend who was in her own right an avid collector. At 11, he made his professional appraisal debut with a collection of 18th-century English porcelain for America’s oldest auction house, Freeman’s in Philadelphia.

And so starting with American furniture, textiles and porcelain, Kent added layer upon layer of period and style to his repertoire. In college, where he studied art history and architectural history, Kent also acquired knowledge of 17th-century Italian furniture and decorative arts.

17th-century Italian armoire

(For more information on the pictured items, click on the images.)

Coming out of college, Kent’s plan had been to do museum curatorial work, only to run into some real-world truths. “I loved the collections, but I hated museum politics,” he said.

Kent continued gathering expertise—from museum collections, auctions and research and by asking questions of dealers and collectors. “You begin to make associations,” Kent explained, “about why this piece is similar to that, and about changes in taste, and what influences dictate trends.”

Museums have sought Kent’s eye and knowledge to help evaluate a broad array of pieces.
Among the institutions he has advised are the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art—both in New York City—the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C.

17th-century Italian chairs

In the 40 years he has been collecting, much has changed, Kent said, including the definition of an antique. “It used to be anything after 1860 wasn’t an antique, it was Victorian, and that was usually said with distain,” Kent said. “Then it was moved up to 1880 and then completely abolished.”

Art Nouveau, Art Deco and other well-designed and well-crafted styles became targets for serious collectors, and more and more collectors entered the market. “There is a lot of newly minted money, hedge-fund money,” Kent said.

Art Nouveau brooch

1920 Art Deco clown

Americana has gotten carried along on these waves, Kent said.

By the 1990s, a wrought-iron weather vane was selling in the millions, where a few years earlier the price tag would have been several thousand dollars.

1954 Hopalong Cassidy lunch box and thermos

In December 1992, Christie’s set a record for a lunch box with the sale of the Dudley Do-Right box and thermos for $2,200. It had cost $2.25 when it was new in 1962. But the kicker that changed the world, as far as establishing the world of collectibles, was the Matt Wyse sale in 1996 where the Superman lunch box circa 1954 sold for an unprecedented $11,500.

“That just changed the way people viewed the market,” Kent said. Once a major house auctioned something as modest as a school lunch box for big dollars, Kent explained, anything might be a valued collectible. “It was,” he said, “a transforming moment.”

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About once a year, some small circus would make its way to Council Grove, Kan., and when it did a circus-dazzled kid named Larry Kellogg—now WorthPoint’s expert on circus collectibles, antiques and memorabilia—would be there.

As an 8-year-old, Kellogg would go to the gas station and markets asking if he could have the circus posters in windows once the show left town. Every ticket stub, program and flier would get pasted into a scrapbook. Those circus posters papered his bedroom walls.

When, in 1956, Ringling Brothers closed its “Big Top” tent, Kellogg, now a high-school student, was “crushed.” It was, however, around this time that Kellogg said he discovered girls, and his love for the circus took a backseat for a few years.

1934 Kelty photo of circus folk in New Haven

In 1960, Kellogg moved to Florida, and by 1971, he was the promotions manager at WFLA-TV in Tampa/St. Petersburg when the circus came walking into his office—so to speak.

Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus was appearing at St. Petersburg’s Bayfront Center Arena, and Kellogg helped promote the show—and thus began a 34-season run in helping to publicize The Greatest Show on Earth.

And how does one publicize the circus? Consider the Elephant Santa. One year, the circus arrived at Christmastime—a difficult moment for the show to get the cover of the local newspaper’s weekend entertainment magazine. “But the editor,” Kellogg recounts, “said, ‘If you can get me a picture of an elephant in a Santa hat, I’ll put it on the cover.’”

Larry Kellogg with his pal, Santa Elephant

Santa Elephant makes the cover

A quick order to the circus costume-and-prop department, and Kellogg had an elephant-size Santa’s hat and the magazine cover. Great publicity!

Some of the earliest items he collected were books about the circus, which Kellogg says is a good place for anyone interested in starting a circus collection. Read what Larry has to say about circus books. http://www.worthpoint.com/blog-entry/circus-books-building-solid-foundation-collecting

Ringling's Rough Riders photographed by Edward Kelty

Among the most sought-after items, Kellogg says, are circus posters, which draw a market of both collectors and people seeking to use the posters for decoration. Still, even today posters from the 1920s and 1930s and early 1940s can be bought for $50 to $200. “The problem is reproductions,” Kellogg advises. “Buying a poster without seeking it is risky.” Click here to learn more about posters.

Another popular market is circus photographs. “These are highly prized and can run from $200 to several $1,000,” Kellogg says. For example, large, 12-by-20 inch photos by Edward Kelty from the 1920s to the early 1940s can fetch as much as $7,000.

Everyone loves a circus clown

Sideshow-freak pictures are also in high demand, with price tags reaching hundreds of dollars. “There are freak collectors and well as circus collectors, so that’s what you are seeing in that market,” Kellogg says.

But there are lots and lots of things to collect from a circus. Kellogg’s collection includes thousands of printed items but also gear—from a sunburst circus wheel to an elephant harness.

Sunburst circus wheel

Among the collectibles Kellogg said he finds most fascinating are the marketing, advertising and business records. There are items, such as route books that recorded the travels and financial accounts. For more on route books, click here.

There were circus “couriers”—magazines that were distributed in advance of the show coming to town and handbills and business forms and even canceled checks. A bundle turned up recently signed by some of the five Ringling brothers from 1912 to 1917.

“This gives you the story not only of the circus, but the business that was the circus,” Kellogg says.

Since Ringling Bros. struck its Big Top more than 50 years ago, generations have grown up without experiencing the smell of sawdust and canvas. “I don’t know if young people really have the same romance with the circus we did,” Kellogg says.

Under the Big Top photo by Edward Kelty

And where are those scrapbooks and posters from Kellogg’s youth? “I don’t know what happened to them,” he said. “I sure wish I had them.”

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Zoran Stamenic’s grandfather was a woolmonger and carter in a small Serbian town near Belgrade. His grandparents’ home was filled with interesting textiles and rugs. “I remember as a boy just lying on the carpet fascinated by the patterns,” said Stamenic, WorthPoint’s expert on antique and collectible carpets and textiles. “It was always something I was aware of, part of life.”

In 1975, Stamenic came to the United States as a student in film and television production at American University in Washington, D.C., and while he had a varied film and TV career—including working for outlets such as CNN—his interest in rugs and tribal tapestries continued to grow. “Textiles were a side interest,” he said, “but as is the case with so many collectors, what started as a hobby turned into a business.” Today, Stamenic is owner of Fairfax, Va.-based Tribal Oriental Rugs and Textiles.

There are two rug and textiles markets: a collectibles market and a decorative market, although the border between the two isn’t always sharp. Sometimes a rug is for the wall and sometimes for the floor.

Collectors go small

“Collectors tend to focus on small textile pieces and small rugs,” Stamenic said. “When you get to the large antique carpets, you are dealing with decorative carpets used in interior design.”

Small textile pieces don’t necessarily come with small prices. A 1-foot-by-1-foot, 19th-century Shahsavan saddlebag can sell for $20,000, Stamenic said.

It was the Altaic nomads who spread their technique for making carpets from China through Tibet, the Caucuses, Iran and the Middle East. But each culture took that technique and made it its own. “The designs grew out of the soil,” Stamenic said. “A carpet is an empowered object. It has the charge of its culture.”

There are three different sources for oriental carpets and textiles—the tribe, the village and the shop or studio. Tribal carpets—smaller, made for everyday use and display—are prized by collectors. “These may be intricate or rough, but they are always very individual and creative,” Stamenic said.

It takes a village . . .

The village carpets were made by families in hamlets around major rug-trading centers, such as Tabriz in Iran or Konya in Turkey. While artisanal, these rugs, unlike the tribal rugs made for personal use, were made for the market.

Bakshaish village rug

This rare, 19th-century Bakshaish village rug was valued at $6,000-$7,000. It was meticulously restored in Turkey prior to the sale. This picture shows what it looked like before the restoration.

Finally, there are the shop or studio rugs made by professionals in the big-market centers, like Teheran and Istanbul. While these rugs are designed in a regional style, they will be “more an expression of an individual,” using dyes made and wool spun somewhere else, Stamenic said. “These carpets have the least ethnographic value,” he explained.

Rugs and carpets are still being made in these regions today, but the work, detail and color doesn’t compare with the carpets of the 19th century and earlier. “There has been a movement to return to the old vegetable dyes and handspun wool, so the carpets now are an improvement over what they were 20 years ago,” Stamenic said, “but its remains the antique pieces that are valued by collectors and sought after by interior designers.”

The prices reflect the difference in the craft and story of these rugs, according to Stemic. As a very rough guide, a 4-foot-by-6-foot antique tribal piece can cost $5,000 to $10,000, a comparable village rug will fetch $3,000 to $4,000 and a shop piece $5,000 to $6,000. The price on a brand new, 4-foot-by-6-foot, handmade rug, using the better vegetable dyes, is about $800.

Judging rugs

And how does one judge a rug? Well, there is the technical part of the craft, like the number of knots, but Stamenic counsels that in the first instance it is a question of beauty. “Does it grab you?” he asked. The key in that aesthetic decision is color. “They say that in real estate, everything is location, location, location,” Stamenic said. “When it comes to rugs, it is color, color, color. No matter how well a rug is made, if it has an off color, that’s it.”

If a rug has beautiful, clear colors—which start with good dyes—the next element to consider is if the carpet has shining, lustrous wool, then the design and the rug’s condition, Stamenic said.

“You have to do your research,” Stamenic said. “The best way to begin is to make connections with a good dealer who will help guide you through the process.” But one thing a would-be buyer should never do is make a purchase without examining the rug. “Never buy a piece where they require the purchase outright first,” he said.

Do your homework

The magazine HALI, a magazine published in London on antique textiles, is a valuable resource.

There are other resources, including key shows—the New York International Tribal and Textile Arts Show and the San Francisco Tribal & Textile Arts Show—and The Textile Museum in Washington, D.C.

For Stamenic, the story behind the rug remains as compelling as the craftsmanship itself. “You look at a 3-foot-by-5-foot Turkeman rug, and it is detailed and exquisite. It may have taken a girl five years to complete as a part of her dowry set. It is more than just a rug. It is an art form that has ties to a larger culture. It is an individual expression, as that girl dreams of what her life may be, and it is an expression of her culture as well.”

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While the economy may be dominated by talk of bulls and bears, when it comes to the Chinese New Year, which begins Jan. 26, it is the Year of the Ox. The ox is the sign of prosperity through fortitude and hard work, and people born under this sign are truthful and sincere. So this probably isn’t the sign for Bernie Madoff, architect of the $50-billion Ponzi scheme.

Chinese New Year Ox by Lladro

(Find out more about  this collectible at  the Lladro’s site.)

It was the Year of the Rat in 2008, which might sound a bit more like Madoff’s year, but it turns out that that was a time of hard work and prosperity—a good time to start a business or get married.

The Chinese New Year is based on a calendar that has been in use for centuries, a combination of lunar and solar calculations. The New Year starts with the new moon on the first day of the calendar new year and ends on the full moon 15 days later.

The 15th day of the New Year is called the Lantern Festival, which is celebrated at night with lantern displays and children carrying lanterns in a parade.

Since the lunar cycle is about 29.5 days, the Chinese have to insert an extra month every few years to catch up with the solar calendar. The years also cycle through 12 animal signs—the rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, sheep or goat, monkey, rooster, dog, and boar or pig.

Ancient Chinese zodiac figures

(For further information on these exceptional Tang-era figures, click here.)

There are five types of ox years. The Metal Ox tends to clash with people who do not agree with him and isn’t very affectionate. The Water Ox is more reasonable and methodical. The Wood Ox flexible and socially adroit. The Fire Ox is forceful and proud.

This is the year of the Earth Ox. The Earth Ox is a “less creative” but “enduring” ox, secure, stable and industrious. Just the ox we need these days.

Antique mutton-fat white jade carving

(If you are interesting in learning more about this piece, visit GoAntiques dealer Objets D’Art Uniques.)

Chinese New Year—with a new animal sign and even nuances with the signs—offers a collecting cornucopia.

The Singapore Mint has, of course, Year of the Ox coins. The mint is striking 88 sets of two five-ounce coins—one gold coin, one silver—with the price for a set $10,604 Singapore or $7,143. The mint is offering other collectibles and gifts, as well.

Singapore coin set

The Lantern Festival marks the end of the New Year’s celebration, and a wide variety of Chinese lanterns is available at the AFC China Co.

On the Chinese calendar, 2010 will be the Year of the Tiger. Business can be difficult for the rash impulsive Tiger, according to the Chinese zodiac, and he could find that money is scarce or withheld from him. He will only be rewarded if he exercises prudence and patience. He must avoid impulsive acts and be conservative in his outlook. Zounds! Sound like the Year of the Tiger has already been here!

2012 Year of the Dragon vases

(To learn more about these Ming vases, go to Ancient Dragon House.)

Visit our Chinese New Year feature page for videos and more stories about Chinese collectibles.

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“It isn’t like putting coins in a slot,” Slicker said. “Each collector puts together a collection no one else has ever done.” It might be the evolution of the mystery novel or the scientific discourse created by the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin’s “Origin of Species.” “It can be anything you are interested in—movie scripts or World War II,” he said.

1859 edition of "Origin of the Species"

“All great collections take on a spherical shape,” Slicker said. “At the core of any collection are high points surrounded by supporting works.”

Taking Darwin’s “Origin of Species” as an example, a collection might include writings of the early 19th-century naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who posited an early theory of evolution in his 1802 book “Recherches sur l’Organisation des Corps Vivans”; writings of Darwin’s contemporaries, such as Thomas Huxley; and contemporary works, like Harvard biologist Edward Wilson’s 1999 “The Diversity of Life.”

“The collection gets to be creative. You get hooked, and you are really contributing to mankind’s knowledge,” Slicker said. “I know it sounds high falutin’, but that is what you are doing!” The fact that many such private collections end up in university libraries buttresses Slicker’s view.

Looking for a textbook, finding a new calling

Slicker’s career as an antiquarian bookseller began in 1972 when as a young psychology graduate student in search of a text, he wandered into The Old New York Bookstore in Atlanta.

Already a bit disillusioned with academe and the thought of clinical practice, Slicker found the bookstore a haven. “I could see I really didn’t have the patience to work with kids,” he said, “When you have a degree in psychology—basically a degree in reading, talking to people and drinking coffee—a bookstore was perfect.”

Slicker apprenticed at, managed and co-owned a bookstore in California and became increasingly interested in rare and antique books. In 1977, he opened Lighthouse Books in St. Petersburg, Fla.

Book collecting has its own body of knowledge and expertise, and when Slicker, who is one of about 450 qualified members of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America, examines a tome, there are things he’ll naturally check.

He will examine the binding, quality of the paper, sewing and whether the volume shows shelf wear or dog-eared pages and the page design and illustrations.

“If you enlarged a page and hung it on a wall, how would it look?” Slicker asked. As for illustrations, one key question is how well they are “married to the text.” The illustrator may also greatly increase the value of a work—be it Renaissance artist Albrecht Durer, the early-20th century’s Maxfield Parrish or highly regarded contemporaries, such as Michael Hague and Barry Moser.

Title page of Durer’s “Vier Bücher von menschlicher”

But that is not all there is to collecting. “Books have a way of becoming part of you,” Slicker said. “A lot of the value in a book is placed there by its owner.”

This is, however, still a market, and Slicker has watched it change in dramatic ways over the last 30 years. “We were very proud 10 or 15 years ago of our international business, as we would send a box of books every few months to England or some place in Europe,” he said. “Today over the Web, we are getting queries from abroad every week and sending books all over, from South Korea to Greece.”

Antique book collecting goes global

“The world is now our audience,” Slicker said. “On the other hand, our walk-in traffic has fallen off. It’s not as much fun to handle an Internet sale. We certainly miss those personal interactions.”

And for books—as for many other collectibles—the Internet has made what once appeared rare easy to find. “It seems that the genuinely rare things have appreciated rapidly. In contrast, books that are relatively common, even those with special interest have plummeted,” Slicker said.

A prime example is James Michener, whose works are widely collected. “When everyone realized how many copies were out there, the books suddenly devalued,” he said. “The $50 book is more likely to sell now for $10.”

In contrast, the 19th-century, illustrated “Views of the Holy Land” by Scottish artist David Roberts, in folio, has gone from tens of thousands of dollars to hundreds of thousands, and the octavo edition has jumped from about $4,000 to $15,000, Slicker said.

Roberts' Arabs at Jacob's Well

Still, Slicker said he believes that eventually all the extras surplus “will get soaked up” and the market will rebound.

For the collector—especially the new collector—Slicker said, the goal should be the creation of a collection, not the market. “The key thing is to collect what you are interested in,” he advised. But he added, “Approach it as you would any other investment, in that you want to do is some research—get bibliographies, visit bookstores and book fairs, and ask a lot of questions.”

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Examples of Bakelite

It started with a cardboard box at a garage sale purchased for $1. In the box was a plastic jewelry set—a bracelet, ring and earrings—all in polka dots. That was the beginning of Maggie Turnipseed’s collecting Bakelite plastics. “There is something about the quality of the pieces. They are very smooth, and they come in a rainbow of colors,” said Turnipseed, a WorthPoint expert on a wide spectrum of collectibles and antiques from hatpins to Victorian jewelry to cast-iron doorstops.

“I wish I could collect just one thing, but I am always finding something new,” said Turnipseed, who is an antique dealer and an accredited appraiser of antiques and residential contents with the International Society of Appraisers. Her specialties are decorative arts, Victoriana, Victorian and Edwardian jewelry, American art pottery and Mexican sterling.

Bakelite wasn’t in her résumé, but Turnipseed applied her tried-and-true technique to the new collectible. “That’s how I usually start. I buy something that catches my eye, and then I try to learn everything I can about it,” she said. “The learning is the most fun.” For Maggie’s blog on Bakelite, click here.

It all began in the 1970s when as a college student Turnipseed became fascinated with hatpins. The pins at 9 to 18 inches (big enough to secure a large hat in thickly piled hair) were stylish and often decorated with gemstones and porcelain. “They were part of an elegant age, although they were really made to hold on a hat,” Turnipseed said.

Antique hatpins

Collecting something as small and obscure as a hatpin in the days before the Internet was a challenge, but over the years, Turnipseed continued gathering them, and today some hatpins sell for thousands of dollars. For more information on them, visit the American Hatpin Society.

From hatpins, Turnipseed moved on to chatelaines, purses worn on the waist that are the forerunner of the lady’s handbag; tussie-mussies, cone-shaped, flower holders carried by Victorian ladies; tea balls, the delicate, little metal-and-silver infusers for brewing tea; and Victorian jewelry.

Chatelaine

“If there is a theme here, they are all very feminine items from the Victorian and Art Nouveaux eras,” Turnipseed said. They can also be described as the art and artifact of a genteel lifestyle now long gone.

The tussie-mussie, or nosegay, for example, had both practical and romantic applications. In the more odiferous Victorian Age, a time of soot, open sewers and carriage-horse droppings, the nosegay, held in hand by a finger ring, could provide a scented burst of relief. The flowers were also signs and symbols—the Langue of Flowers it was called. Pansies signified loving thoughts, mint warm feelings, ivy friendship. “Just think of putting the wrong flower in your tussie-mussie and sending the wrong message!” Turnipseed said. Click here to learn more about tussie-mussies.

A tussie-mussie

Among Turnipseed’s newest collections is Victorian jewelry, which just like the Bakelite, began with acquiring a few random pieces that caught her eye. “It is the story of my life. I go to an antique show and get distracted. I should wear blinders,” she said.

Again, as she did with Bakelite, Turnipseed embarked on the study of Victorian jewelry, collecting books and price guides. “You just read and read,” she said. “The Internet has also made a big different because now you can see pictures of so many items.”

At the moment, Victorian jewelry and Victoriana are a buyer’s market. “Victoriana just is not ‘it’ right now,” Turnipseed said. It is a cautionary tale of the fickle nature of the collectibles market. “Art Deco and midcentury are hotter because that is what the young are collecting, if they are collecting at all.”

So Victoriana may be in that soft spot between really old and rare and really trendy and really a good buy. “I am hanging on to my collection,” Turnipseed said. “One day the market will turn. I’m betting on it.”

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“One of the great appeals of these pieces is that while they were made for utilitarian purposes—to hold things or to be sharp—they are also beautiful They’d take a piece of flint or bone and make something artful and useful out of it,” said Morgan, who is WorthPoint’s Indiana Jones or at least its expert on pre-Columbian and Native American collectibles and antiques.

Tripod bowl with rattle legs from the Guanacaste region of Costa Rica, located circa 1950

What started as a boyhood hunt, led Morgan in college to take courses in anthropology, and materials and methods of primitive art. What Morgan learned was that there were strong commonalities among indigenous cultures.

“In primitive societies, the needs were pretty much the same—food, clothing, shelter,” Morgan said, “and depending upon how they were able to organize socially, you have simpler or more complex pieces.”

Decoration also cuts across time and geography. “There is a universality of symbols and shapes that are used time and again. There are a lot of circles, crosses and spirals.” Many of these primitive symbols point toward the same thing—man trying to understand his world and the forces in it.

Small pre-Columbian Mayan portrait vase depicting an old god, or the god of fire, in reddish buff terra cotta

The same is true for many other ancient items. “A stone ax made a thousand years ago in North America and one made in South America are virtually identical,” Morgan said.
It begins to get interesting as cultures mature and circumstances promote the development of more advanced and permanent civilization. With civilization, you begin to see broadly held beliefs—religion, for instance—manifest itself in the “Art” of the society.

While once collecting Native American, Central American and South American art might have required trekking jungles, climbing into tombs and excavating lost cities, eBay has made it a lot easier. “Right now, there is a lot of art out there, and it is having the effect of diluting prices generally,” Morgan said. “If you study and know what to look for, you can find very good values. You also need to have some idea of the origin of pieces.”

With indigenous and historical art, this is a very big issue. “There is a moral dilemma in collecting material that you don’t face in collecting furniture or a piece of china,” Morgan said.

Some of the material popping up on the Internet is coming from, what Morgan calls, “the cleaning out of America’s attic.” These are pieces that a father or grandfather may have picked up in their travels. But then there are pieces that may come from looting and illicit trade.

Votive sculpture heads from the region of Teotihuacan, often broken and placed in fields to ensure fertility

“Authentication is a big issue,” Morgan said. “Can you establish that it has been in a collection for a number of years?” Another way of protecting oneself is to work through reputable online auction houses. “What we are striving for is an honest and open market,” Morgan said.

A careful and knowledgeable collector will also be alert to warning signs about certain pieces. For example, Morgan said that the most durable items tend to be ceramic, or made of stone or bone. “You can find pre-Columbian as far back as a couple of thousand years.” But when less durable items, such as woven baskets, wooden pieces, come on the market, a buyer should beware. It is more likely that these are freshly excavated. “It is no secret that a lot of sites in Peru are still being dug,” Morgan said.

Although the term pre-Columbian art denotes any object before 1492, the most widely collected period is from about 1800 B.C. to 1500 A.D. and includes the well-known cultures of Mexico, Central and South America, including the Maya, Aztec, Moche and Inca.

Small tripod bowl with alligator legs from the Chiriqui region of Costa Rica

There remain great opportunities for building a collection of striking and antique pieces, Morgan said. “These cultures are fascinating and well worth learning about. And if you know what you are looking at and are dogged, you can get value.” If you don’t want to become an expert, Morgan advises working with a reputable dealer or auction house.

“There are so many cultures, so many forms, the first thing to do is to try specializing and do your best to understand that culture, the specifics forms of ceramics that they produced,” Morgan said.

Bowl from Guanacaste province, Costa Rica, with human-effigy supports

Starting out doesn’t take huge amounts of money. There are small antique pieces—a small bowl that can be gotten for as low as $50. Decent ceramic starter pieces may run $200 to $300. “Don’t worry about a little damage, these pieces are old, and little wear or a couple of chips are perfectly acceptable”

“One of the misconceptions is that this art is ridiculously expensive, but it isn’t,” Morgan said. “It really depends on how much someone works at it. It truly is a treasure hunt, and the rewards can be big for the learned and determined collector.”

There were no more than eight of the moss-green colored glass bottles, which stand just a tad over nine inches high and are valued as high as $10,000, known to exist when a business dealing with a New Englander on another bottle led to the rare tonic bottle emerging from an attic.

Sachems Bottle

“That’s the thing about the bottle market, there are still new discoveries and surprises,” Lindsey said. “Not quite as many as there used to be, but just enough to keep things interesting.”

The tradition of bottle collecting started out West, digging at old mining and logging camps, ghost town and whistle stops. That’s how Lindsey, who lives in Klamath Falls, Ore., started digging for bottles at Pacific Northwest mining and logging sites as a boy. “These were family outings,” Lindsey said.

Starting in the 1950s, the growing popularity of bottle collecting was driven by such “diggers,” and while digging started in the mining camps out west, it soon spread east. “Urban renewal opened a lot of land in big cities like New York and Philadelphia, and people started to hunt,” Lindsey said. “Wherever people lived, you find bottles, and for a long time, bottles were valuable, they were reused, so recycling goes back a long way. It was only after the Civil War that bottles became a common throwaway item.”

The collectible bottle market has focused on the period of blown-glass bottles—stretching in the U.S. from the late 1700s to the early 20th century, Lindsey said. In the 1920s, machine-produced glass containers supplanted hand-blown glass. Although now even some machine-made items like vintage milk and applied color label (aka ACL) soda bottles are seeing a market, Lindsey said.

And what makes a bottle a valuable collectible?

First, it generally can’t be machine made. It has to be hand-blown glass. “If one compares similar bottles made by both methods, one will easily be able to see the difference—the hand-blown example will have more ‘character’ to the glass,” Lindsey advised.

Cottle Bottle

Second, the brighter or odder the color, the greater the chances it is more valuable. “Color is king,” Lindsey said. There are, for instance, the soda bottles of Cottle, Post & Co., a Portland, Ore., beverage maker during the late 1870s. Most of the Cottle soda bottles were made in a blue-green glass that now fetches around $350 a bottle. There were, however, a few bottles blown in amber glass, and those go for about $2,000, Lindsey said.

Third, the odder the shape, the more valuable the bottle will be, both for its oddity and the fact that fewer of these will manage to survive making them rarer. Consider the elegant cathedral or “Gothic” pickle bottles of the mid-19th century. These long and graceful bottles broke easily, and so they are rare and can fetch upward of $40,000 for the extremely rare, deep amber glass examples produced in New England.

Pickle Bottle

Fourth, the bottle’s embossing can add to its value. Embossing took the place of labels early on, Lindsey explained. While many of the bottles sported just the name of the product and the manufacturer, others have embossing and motifs that were artistic, historical or commercial. There are, for example, the “Corn for the World” flasks with a large, heavily embossed ear of corn and the motto “Corn for the World.” These flasks run a few hundred dollars in aqua color, with the much rarer and aesthetic shades of deep green, various blues and blue-greens, and amber examples (someone once said, “Color is king”) being worth up to $4,000 or more.

Corn Front Bottle

A lot of historical details and information can be found on Lindsey’s website and at the Historic Glass and Bottle Identification & Information website, sponsored by the Society for Historic Archaeology and the federal Bureau of Land Management of which Lindsey is creator and author.

Bottle collecting got a big boost in the 1980s when several big auction houses held regular auctions featuring bottles, Lindsey said, and then got another market jolt with the advent of the Internet.

“Everything started to escalate, and in that flush of excitement, everything went,” Lindsey said. The glass bubble has, however, burst, and a little wiser and savvier approach is called for. “Most of the good stuff has been found,” Lindsey said, and then added, “But you know out in Virginia City, Nev., which has been the mecca for Western bottle diggers since the 1950s, they still turn up a good piece now and then.”

WorthPoint—Get the Most from Your Antiques & Collectibles

Before setting up his watch-and-clock repair business in Miami in 1976, Mycko had paid the bills fixing cars and Coke machines. “I have this overall fascination with gears, pinions, main springs and power supplies,” he said. “I’ve always wanted to see how mechanical things work . . . I am a gear freak.”

Gears to watches

The watch, however, has been a lifelong passion. The first one Mycko worked on as a boy was his father’s Gruen wristwatch, which he took apart and put back together. And it still worked.

As collectibles, the watch has two faces—the technological and the artistic. “Rolex is technically oriented,” Mycko said. “Rolex’s goal has been to produce a high-quality watch that is ‘chronometer accurate’ and can withstand all temperatures at high altitude or under deep ocean pressure.”

The handmade 18th- and 19th-century pocket watches—with enameling and fancy engraved gold cases—are the art. “They are like snowflakes, no two are alike,” Mycko said. “No gear is interchangeable with another watch. When I have to repair one of these, I have to make the parts myself.”

There are many approaches and kinds of watches to collect, Mycko advised. There are the 19th-century decorative antique pocket watches—multicolored gold and finely engraved, which can run from hundreds of dollars to tens of thousands.

There are 20th-century “railroad watches.” These were an exceptional product of the Industrial Age and now fetch $100 to $10,000. “Railroad watches are appreciated and collected from the inside out,” Mycko explained. The precision and technical beauty went into their internal parts, and then they were housed “in high-quality, durable and functional but low-cost metal cases.”

A burgeoning market sprang up in wristwatches soon after the fall of gold in 1980. “This is an example of how the market swings,” Mycko said. “When I got into the business, it was all pocket watches, no one bothered with wristwatches.” Now there’s a broad array of interests. One interesting, but confounding area is the “comic-character watch.”

The idea of a Mickey Mouse watch was hatched in 1932 when a buyer for Montgomery Ward suggested to Disney’s merchandising mastermind, Kay Kamen, that a watch with Mickey on its face could be a big hit. Kamen then commissioned preliminary sketches from Disney artists and brought them to the Ingersoll-Waterbury Co.

In 1933, the first watches went into production, and their success was unprecedented. In one day, 11,000 were sold at Macy’s.

By June 1935, more than 2.5 million Mickey Mouse wristwatches had been sold. Several other watch companies jumped on the comic-watch bandwagon, and soon nearly every popular comic character was on a pocket watch or wristwatch. In 1989, Mycko co-authored “Vintage American and European Character Wristwatch Price Guide 1989” with Roy Ehrhardt, the leading watch-book author of the time.

Mickey Mouse #1 still rules

But the advent of the color copier has made it too easy to counterfeit character watches. “That really killed the market,” Mycko said. Although people are still in the hunt for a “#1 Mickey Mouse,” which can still bring $300-$500.

Character watches remain a fluky market, Mycko said, because certain watches can cross over to other collectibles markets. “A Popeye collector is going to want that Popeye wristwatch and will pay $1,500, which makes no sense to a watch collector,” he said.

All those 1930s-, ’40s-, ’50s-style Benrus, Bulova and Hamilton watches are now highly collectible for their retro styling and innovations that made them popular when new. Even Seiko and Timex (remember the “It takes a licking and keeps on ticking” ads?) form another market with prices ranging from $50 to $1,000. There is “something for everyone,” Mycko said.

At the top of the market are the expensive watches Patek Philippe, Vacheron Constantin and Audemars Piguet, followed closely by Cartier and Tiffany. These watches were expensive when new, and in many cases, their values have soared.

Production-made watches like Rolex, Longines, Omega and LeCoultre that catered to a lesser-priced market are highly collectible today. But, with few exceptions, these lesser watch companies along with the styles of watches produced have had their day and have lost their cachet as the collectible-watch market changes. Consider an Omega watch made in the 1920s, with a curved back and Art Deco numbers. For a while, those watches commanded prices of $2,000 to $5,000. Now, Mycko said, they are “hard to sell at $1,500.”

The market, however, is filled with surprises. A self-winding enamel dial wristwatch from the ’60s by Swiss watchmaker Patek Philippe used to run $2,500 to $3,500. The very same watch now commands $25,000 to $35,000. A Rolex Cosmograph that Mycko said he had trouble selling for $600 to $800, now sells for up to $55,000.

“There is a lot going on at this upper end,” Mycko said. These are the big investment bets and also the ego buys. “What you wear on your wrist tells a lot about your station in life. It’s like driving around in a Ferrari. The world knows you have arrived. And, it most definitely is a macho thing.”

“I call it organized insanity,” Mycko said. “They may be collectibles, investments or the stuff of dreams.”

WorthPoint—Get the Most from Your Antiques & Collectibles

For Bernstein, it all began when as a 9-year-old at summer camp, the cook staff gave him outdated Florida and Mississippi license plates. That acquisition turned Bernstein into a boy with a mission.

Andy would cruise through shopping-mall parking lots on his bike, and if he spied an out-of-state plate, he’d linger until the driver came back to his car and ask if he could have the plate when it expired. “Often they were people who had just moved, and they had to get new plates,” Bernstein said.

1958 plate depicting a favorite Colorado pastime (left), New Hampshire’s Live Free or Die plate (is that referring to the moose?) (right)

Though, it wasn’t all that easy. “People’s reactions were usually suspicious, ‘Why do you want those plates?’ or ‘You can’t have them, they have to be turned in,’” Bernstein said. A couple of times a week, he would pedal over to the local junkyard in search of plates on wrecks. “At first, the owner was pretty unfriendly. He didn’t want a kid in there where he could be hurt,” Bernstein said. “But over time, we became friends.”

“It was a long uphill battle, but after about five years, I had managed to collect a license plate from every state and the District of Columbia,” Bernstein said. It was also around this time that a now teenage Bernstein discovered the Automobile License Plate Collectors Association. “I couldn’t believe it,” Bernstein said. “I realized I wasn’t in this alone. I wasn’t the only crazy one.”

Bernstein immediately joined and began building a network of friendships that has been even more valuable than the licenses plates he has collected—and he has amassed more than 65,000 plates.

Texas plate remembering the space-shuttle disaster (left), a to-drool-for Maine lobster plate (right)

The license plate, as we know it, began in Massachusetts in 1903, and by the late teens, all the states had adopted some type of standardized license plate. The most sought-after plates are from this early period, particularly those that were porcelain or enamel, which were soon replaced with painted, metal plates. For more on license-plate history and markets, see Bernstein’s blog, The Lure of Collecting Automobile License Plates.

There has been an explosion of varieties and styles of license plates—with specialized plates, vanity plates, and changing styles and graphics. “It is quite common now that when a state is going to change its license plate, it posts several designs on a Web site and lets people vote,” Bernstein said.

A vanity plate from Alabama where someone loves Jon (left) and one from Kentucky showing allegiance to the Louisville Cardinals (right)

The rise of Internet selling, (including at Bernstein’s site, Plate Hut), the variety of plates and the advent of new collectors—including a rise in international collectors—have all led to the creation of “micromarkets,” Bernstein said. “For a 1931 Model A Ford owner in Illinois, the finishing touch is getting 1931 Illinois plates. That is a specialized market.”

In fact, Bernstein sometimes gets calls from film companies looking for period plates to put on a car being used in a scene. License-plate art and handicrafts is another market, as license plates have been used to make items as varied as CD cases, purses, dustpans, toolboxes and birdhouses, Bernstein said.

Europeans have been especially fascinated with American license plates, Bernstein said. “License plates in Europe tend to be long and black with just numbers and maybe a letter to indicate the country, so our plates with their designs and colors really catch the eye.”

The prices for license plates, as a result or these complex and varied markets, have remained strong, Bernstein said. Still, while the rarest porcelain plate can fetch $10,000, a beginner starting out with a one-plate-per-state goal can manage for between $150 and $350.

As for his own collecting, Bernstein is in the hunt to add commemorative, political and picture plates to his collection—as well as those rare and elusive porcelain plates. And where does he store them all? Well, some are with his parents and some with a friend. But a large portion are arranged on a bookshelf in his apartment. “My brother says he feels sorry for the people who live downstairs,” Bernstein said, “because one day they are going to be buried in an avalanche of license plates.”

WorthPoint—Get the Most from Your Antiques & Collectibles

The ethics of an archaeologist forbid collecting any of the things she might unearth in an excavation—arrowheads, potsherds and such—which is why Dolores Elliott, Worthpoint’s expert on Iroquois antique and collectible beadwork, began collecting Iroquois pincushions and frames. “You are not likely to dig up a pincushion,” Elliott said.

A lifelong resident of central New York State—homeland of the tribe—Elliott bought her first beadwork as a girl at the New York State Fair where she was showing her cows in a 4-H competition. She purchased a small red, heart-shaped pincushion, proclaiming STATE FAIR 1958, at the fair’s Indian Village as a gift for her mother.

After receiving a master’s degree in archaeology from Binghamton (New York) University, she moved to the country to homestead and raise a family, but her interest in ethnology, archaeology and the Iroquois never waned. She became involved with the non-profit Iroquois Studies Association, where she organized and directed the Otsiningo Powwow for 25 years.

In organizing various events and exhibitions, she became increasingly versed in beadwork—and a collector, as well. “I love collecting. My mother collected Indian baskets, so it’s in the blood,” Elliott said.

In the 16th century, Europeans brought sparkling glass beads to American that the Iroquois preferred over the less colorful ones they had made from natural materials.

By the 19th century, the Iroquois beadworkers were making a wide range of beaded items, including pincushions and purses, which they sold at Niagara Falls and other tourist spots, as well as at fairs and Wild West shows.

That tradition continues today as contemporary Iroquois beadworkers follow the practices of their ancestors while developing new beadwork styles. For a history of Iroquois beadwork, take a look at Elliott’s blog insights.

While the craft is old and traditional, the Internet transformed the market for collecting beadwork. “The Internet has become a great research tool,” Elliott said. “I can talk to other collectors, they can talk to me, and we can share information.”

And it is also growing the market. “For many years, there was a small band of collectors,” Elliott said. “But now when I go on eBay, I’m seeing new people all the time.”

The cybermart has made prices more rational. “You go to an antique shop or a flea-market stall, and you might find one or two pieces that are generally overpriced because they really don’t know what they’ve got,” Elliott said. “But there are probably 100 pieces on eBay at any one time.”

Elliott, who recently bought her 1,057th piece on eBay, said that interest has also gradually raised prices. When she was starting out 30 years ago, beadwork items could be bought for $5, but now they start at $40, and some pieces can fetch $600.

About 200,000 pieces of beadwork have been created in the last 200 years, Elliott estimated, and there are about 60 different forms—canoes, picture frames, heart-shaped pincushions, pocket-watch holders, check holders, strawberries.

For anyone interested in starting a beadwork collection, Elliott has a few tips.

Be wary of descriptions on the Web—unless there is a Dolores Elliott correction. Elliott often weighs in on the description of pieces up for sale. Many sellers don’t know what they have and often don’t even recognize a beaded piece as Iroquois beadwork.

Buy only items that have all their beads—“Some people think pieces can be repaired, but they can’t,” Elliott said. “The old beads are no longer available.”

Pick a style with which to start—The most popular, and expensive, are the beaded picture frames that can go for hundreds of dollars. The least expensive are little square pincushions that sell from $40 to $80. “This is really a question of taste,” Elliott said, “what kinds of designs, colors—antiques or modern pieces.”

The wide variety in shapes, sizes, colors and designs are fascinating. Elliott said that after having studied nearly 25,000 pieces of Iroquois beadwork, she has never seen two that were identical.

Over the last two centuries, many beautiful pieces have been created. Each one is a treasure to admire and to own. “There is so much tradition, history and skill in these pieces, they are wonderful,” Elliott said.

WorthPoint—Get the Most from Your Antiques & Collectibles

“And it turns out,” Carrier says, “that except for the rare and antique specimens, flags are easy and relatively inexpensive to collect. They also serve as a window on geography, government, politics, history, art, language, culture and design. If you can decipher a flag, you can understand the community that created it.”

Flags trace their origins to the vellixum – a type of banner held aloft by a long pole used by the Roman Legions. “It was a way for generals to know where their troops were,” Carrier said. The word for the study of flags “vexillology” comes from the vellixum. Tom has been a Board member of the North American Vexillological Association or NAVA and founding president of the Chesapeake Bay Flag Association. For the NAVA Website see: http://www.nava.org/

“The history of the flag, as we know it, really dates from the period of the Crusades, beginning in the 12th century,” Carrier said. “The flags were still a way of telling who was on the battlefield, but heraldry began to establish precise rules as to color and design at about this time.”

“Some of the basic rules of heraldry still apply when designing a flag,” Carrier says. “First and foremost, flags should not have more than three colors. They shouldn’t have writing or seals on them and they should have a simple design, one that can be easily recognizable from a distance.” The Virginia and New Hampshire state flags, for example, both have seals on a dark blue background so from a distance they are hard to tell apart. “On the other hand, the state flags of Ohio, Maryland, New Mexico and Texas, in contrast, are considered “perfect flags” — with bold colors and a distinctive design,” Carrier says. To look at state flags see http://www.50states.com/flag/.

There are many ways to collect flags. Some American flags are valued by their different star-patterns, for the placement was only made official in 1912 by President William Howard Taft with the 48 star flag. Serious collectors focus on early 19th Century and Civil War flags where it costs “several thousand dollars just to get started, because the star patterns varied widely throughout the 19th century.” Although the star pattern of the 48 star flag was consistent after 1912, the ones made with wool bunting before World War II have about a third higher collector value than the ones made of cotton or nylon when wool was used instead for uniforms.

An easier quarry is city, state and county flags, Carrier says, which tend to cost about $35 to $60 new. The goal of collectors pursuing national flags is getting ones that are made in the country they represent. “It used to be very difficult to get a flag of the Soviet Union.” Carrier said. “An individual in the Soviet Union couldn’t own or display a flag, because they were all the property of the state. Now, with its demise, they are flooding the market with a value of about $20 to $60.”

Then there is, of course, Carrier’s first vexilollogical interest, flags of heads of state. “Just about every head of state has a distinctive flag — from Uganda, to Tunisia, to Sri Lanka, even the United States,” Carrier says. So one thing Edward Fenech-Adami, the president of Malta, and England’s Queen Elizabeth have in common are flags – though not the same flag. In fact in addition to a personal flag Queen Elizabeth has 16 other flags of her own across British Commonwealth countries. For the presidential flag of Malta see http://www.doi.gov.mt/EN/state/symbols.asp and for Queen Elizabeth’s personal flag see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Flag_of_Queen_Elizabeth_II. Carrier has led tours at the White House with the U.S. Secret Service and the White House Curator to tell the history of the flag and seal of the president of the United States so they could better inform the visitors during the public tours.

But you don’t have to be a head of state to wave your own flag, Carrier advises. “A flag store will make-up a personal flag for you to your own design,” he said, “and then you can fly it whenever you want. Just remember the basic rules of flag design. My personal flag consists of my favorite colors, dark blue and gold, with my favorite design element, the star, one for each letter of my last name.”

John, however, is a member of Marks4Antiques.com, a unique Web-based reference service created by Worthologists Alex and Elizabeth Papalexis. Marks4Antiques.com enables subscribers to match identifying marks on antiques and to survey auction prices for comparable pieces. When the mark on the eBay figurine was checked, it turned out to be a recent reproduction. “It was a beautiful porcelain piece but probably not worth more than $150,” said Alex.

Googling doesn’t always get the answer

Some folks may try to Google for information on antiques or collectibles that have gotten their interest on eBay or RubyLane, but often that doesn’t give either sufficient or reliable information. Some collectors rely on books and catalogs—but getting them and staying current can be a chore.

“There is not as much information available out there as people think,” said Elizabeth. “There wasn’t an authoritative, easy-to-disseminate single source.”

Enter Marks4Antiques.com, which offers services for identifying ceramics, porcelain, pottery, china, silver, jewelry and decorative-arts items in general. An additional service offers a price search for antiques and collectibles sold at auction so that members can self-appraise their treasures.

Collectibles hobby becomes a business

All this began with the couple’s penchant for collecting. “It started as a hobby, became a passion and turned into a business,” Alex said. Trained as a physicist and engineer, he had a fascination for scientific instruments—old microscopes, barometers, sextants, quack medical devices and even old HP calculators.

Elizabeth began her collecting with Royal Winton Chintz cups and saucers, service sets and teapots, sterling-silver napkin rings and bonbon dishes. Often, the hunt involved getting up at the crack of dawn to buy pieces out of the back of collectors’ vehicles at what the British call a “car boot sale.” The hunt extended from English flea markets to shops and auctions across Europe and the United States. (For more about various types of porcelain, read Alex and Elizabeth’s blog.)

The couple moved from London to San Francisco’s Silicon Valley when Alex took a post as an executive with a high-tech company. At the same time, the Internet was just about beginning to enter our everyday lives, especially eBay. So, they stepped up their collecting and online sales of fine and antique tableware and decorative items. And that’s when they realized the need and opportunity for better and on-demand reference data. “With the Web, everything moves so fast,” Elizabeth said. “You often need information right away.”

Pictorial galleries

Marks4Antiques.com is an easy-to-use site with visual guides. All marks are presented in photos and are divided in pictorial galleries of shapes or letters. Each library of marks offers more than 12,000 images of identifying marks for pottery, china, ceramics, porcelain, jewelry, silver or silver plate, pewter etc, as well as extra background help. The Values4Antiques site allows subscribers to search a database for all types of antiques and collectibles sold at auction. Type in “Wedgwood plate,” and up pops pictures of recent Wedgwood chinaware sold at auction with dates and prices.

Members of the sites also have the option of sending marks for identification. “When we receive a question, it is like a jigsaw puzzle, and we won’t stop until we find the answer,” Alex said. Once they identify a mark, it is added to the online database. “Our goal is to make the sites as comprehensive and all-inclusive as possible. And, in a way, the contents are a live document that continually grows with updated information” said Elizabeth.

The couple is encouraged that they are moving in the right direction as more and more subscribers from around the world—the U.S. to the U.K. to South Africa and Australia—join Marks4Antiques.com.

“Our members tell us that they feel a special connection with us, especially because we are there for them and reply to their questions when they are about to buy or sell an item. It’s like having an antiques expert on retainer,” said Elizabeth. “You can’t do that with a book!”

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Join WorthPoint on Twitter and Facebook.

John, however, is a member of Marks4Antiques.com – a unique Web-based reference service created by Worthologists Alex and Elizabeth Papalexis. Marks4Antiques.com enables subscribers to match identifying marks on antiques and to survey auction prices for comparable pieces. When the mark on the eBay figurine was checked, it turned out to be a recent reproduction. “It was a beautiful porcelain piece but probably not worth more than $150,” said Alex.

Some folks may try to Google for information on an antique or collectible that’s gotten their interest on eBay or RubyLane, but often that doesn’t give either sufficient or reliable information. Some collectors rely on books and catalogues – but getting them and staying current can be a chore “There is not as much information available out there as people think,” said Elizabeth. “There wasn’t an authoritative, easy to disseminate single source.”

Enter Marks4Antiques.com – which offers services for identifying ceramics, porcelain, pottery, china, silver, jewelry and Decorative Arts items in general. An additional service offers a price search for antiques and collectibles sold at auction so that members can self-appraise their treasures.

All this began with the couple’s penchant for collecting. “It started as a hobby, became a passion and turned into a business,” Alex said. Trained as physicist and engineer, he had a fascination for scientific instruments — old microscopes, barometers, sextants, quack medical devices, and even old HP calculators. [For Alex’s blog on old microscopes see http://www.worthpoint.com/item/microscopic-view-past]

Elizabeth began her collecting with Royal Winton Chintz cups & saucers, service sets and teapots, sterling silver napkin rings and bon-bon dishes. Often, the hunt involved getting up at the crack of dawn to buy pieces out of the back of collectors’ vehicles at what the British call a “car boot sale.” The hunt extended from English flea markets to shops and auctions across Europe and the United States. [For more about various types of porcelain see Alex and Elizabeth’s blog http://www.worthpoint.com/blog-entry/types-porcelain-hard-paste-soft-paste-and-bone-china]

The couple moved from London to San Francisco’s Silicon Valley when Alex took a post as an executive with a high-tech company. At the same time, the Internet was just about beginning to enter our everyday lives, especially eBay. So, they stepped up their collecting and online sales of fine and antique tableware and decorative items. And that’s when they realized the need and opportunity for better and on-demand reference data. “With the Web everything moves so fast,” Elizabeth said. “You often need information right away.”

Marks4Antiques.com is an easy to use site with visual guides. All marks are presented in photos and are divided in pictorial galleries of Shapes or Letters. Each library of marks offers more than 12,000 images of identifying marks for pottery, china, ceramics, porcelain, jewelry, silver or silver-plate, pewter etc, as well as extra background help. The Values4Antiques site allows subscribers to search a database for all types of Antiques & Collectibles sold at auction. Type in “Wedgwood plate” and up pops pictures of recent Wedgwood chinaware sold at auction with dates and prices.

Members to the sites also have the option of sending marks for identification. “When we receive a question, it is like a jigsaw puzzle and we won’t stop until we find the answer,” Alex said. Once we identify a mark, it is added to the online database. “Our goal is to make the sites as comprehensive and all-inclusive as possible. And, in a way, the contents are a live document that continually grows with updated information” said Elizabeth.

The couple is encouraged that they are moving in the right direction as more and more of subscribers from around the world – the USA to the UK to South Africa and Australia — join Marks4Antiques.com. “Our members tell us that they feel a special connection with us, especially because we are there for them and reply to their questions when they are about to buy or sell an item. It’s like having an antiques expert on retainer” said Elizabeth – “you can’t do that with a book!”

Seven presidential elections later, Warlick will be at the Democratic convention in Denver with the American Presidential Experience, the largest collection of presidential memorabilia outside the Smithsonian Institution.

Jim Warlick speaking at the American Presidential Experience press conference in July

There will be an antique copy of the Declaration of Independence made in 1776, Harry Truman’s presidential limousine, a pair of Abraham Lincoln’s shoes and campaign buttons going back to 1804.

“We are really trying to get people close to the American presidents though this nonpartisan tribute to the office,” said Warlick. “It isn’t about the DNC. It isn’t about Barrack Obama. It’s about the presidency.”

Warlick—who started gathering election memorabilia at age 10 in Morgantown, N.C., by stuffing mailboxes with Democratic campaign literature and saving copies for himself—mounted a smaller version of the American Presidential Experience at the Republicans’ 2000 convention in Philadelphia. It drew more than 90,000 people. The idea for the exhibit came from former Philadelphia mayor, Democrat Ed Rendell.

After the Philadelphia convention, Warlick hit upon the idea of a traveling exhibit that drew more than 300,000 in New York City and formed the foundation for the American Presidential Experience Museum in Branson, Mo. Warlick located the museum in Branson, he said, “because I felt that there were a lot of kids from the Midwest that might never get to Washington, D.C., to see that kind of presidential memorabilia.”

$10-million Declaration of Independence on display

In Denver, Warlick’s collection will be buttressed by a large exhibit by the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, in Springfield, Ill., and the $10-million copy of the Declaration of Independence, which is on loan from television producer Norman Lear.

There will also be documents signed by each of the nation’s presidents from George Washington to George W. Bush and replicas of gowns worn by 10 of the nation’s First Ladies. Other replicas will include the Oval Office (visitors will be able to sit at the desk and have their picture taken) and the 707 Boeing version of Air Force One.

First Ladies’ inaugural gowns

“This is as close as people can get to the presidency,” Warlick said.

Indeed, over the last 28 years, the thing that has changed most at political conventions has been the ability of ordinary people to get close to the action, said Warlick, who has also designed campaign material for nine presidential candidates including Michael Dukakis, Walter Mondale, Gary Hart and John Glenn.

“Back in 1980, you could wait outside the convention and get a floor pass and go in for a look,” he said. “When you came out, somebody else could use the pass.” Both the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, and the nature of the convention itself have changed that.

“Security is very, very tight now, and floor passes are only good for those people they are issued to,” Warlick said. “That’s one of the reasons we are putting on the Presidential Experience.”

The convention itself has also changed. “It’s all show now, very high tech, very scripted,” Warlick said. “The old convention started in the afternoon and ran until 10 p.m. There was often a lot of give-and-take on issues and surprises. George H. W. Bush didn’t name Dan Quayle as his running mate until the second day of the convention.”

“That sort of thing doesn’t happen anymore,” he said. “Everything is a foregone conclusion.”

Jim Warlick’s Worthologist Profile—See link below

The story tells a lot about Worthologist Warlick and his keen sense of both politics and collecting. His career began at age 10 in Morgantown, N.C., where he stuffed mailboxes with campaign literature for Democratic candidates and saved copies of everything.

Warlick kept taking semesters off from college to work in campaigns, collecting all the while. In 1978, he went to work on Capitol Hill for North Carolina Congressman Lamar Gudger Jr. As the 1980 campaign approached, Warlick had an idea—he’d get to the nominating conventions by making and selling campaign buttons. “I had this beautiful, old, turn-of-the-century-style Carter campaign button made,” Warlick said.

Then he made Reagan buttons, and the Democratic congressional aide went to the Republican convention in Detroit where his button-hawking landed him on “The Today Show.” Then it was on to Democratic convention in New York City. “By the time it was over, I had made more at the two conventions than I did in a year working for the congressman. So I quit,” Warlick said.

Warlick designed the campaign buttons and material for nine presidential hopefuls, including Michael Dukakis, Walter Mondale, Gary Hart and John Glenn. And he has trolled the political-memorabilia world snaring such prizes as the items on Franklin Roosevelt’s Oval Office desktop.

The history of campaign buttons really begins in the 1896 race between William Jennings Bryan and William McKinley when a thin piece of protective celluloid was placed over printed paper and wrapped around a metal disk. This ushered in a golden age of colorful campaign buttons.

A lot of the button market is rooted in the politics of the campaign, Warlick noted. In 1924, after 103 ballots, John W. Davis emerged as the nominee of an exhausted Democratic Party. “Boy, talk about a brokered convention,” Warlick said. There was not much campaign money or enthusiasm, and Davis lost to Calvin Coolidge. That, however, has made Davis buttons rare and valuable, fetching as much as $40,000.

In 1948, President Harry Truman was such an underdog to Republican New York Gov. Thomas Dewey that the early edition of one newspaper declared Dewey the winner. Warlick bought a copy in the 1980s for $800. “Today they are going for more that $5,000 if you can find one,” he said.

The buttons from Hubert Humphrey’s 1968 campaign, crippled by anti-war protest at the Chicago convention and the unpopular Vietnam War, similarly fetch high values.

The 2008 campaign will likely take its place among the historic campaigns, Warlick said, with the first serious African-American and woman candidates. The buttons have also grown bigger now reaching 3-1/2 inches in diameter.

The market has been dramatically transformed by the advent of the Internet and eBay, Warlick said. Now buttons can be seen and traded instantaneously. “When I started, there were three big books on campaign buttons everyone relied on,” he said, “and you’d have to rely on descriptions of buttons up for sale.”

That has all changed and with it a swell of new collectors that has helped drive up sales, Warlick said. The price of a Roosevelt campaign button, for example, has quadrupled in value to about $20 in the mid-1980s.

And what was the best campaign button of all presidential elections in the last 112 years? “In 1944, when Roosevelt ran for his third term,” Warlick said, “the Republicans issued a button ‘No Man Is Good Three Times.’”

For more information on Jim Warlick, see his Worthologist profile.

When Pattie decided that his future wasn’t atop a pole he went to work for an uncle who had an auction business. “I started by driving a truck and moving furniture,” Pattie said. But over time he became increasingly interested and versed in a range of antique markets, collectible fields – and the art of the auction.

Growing up on a farm near Manassas, Virginia, Pattie first attended auctions as a boy. “When a farmer was going out of business, there’d be an auction to sell of farm equipment, cattle, household items, the hay in the barn – everything,” he said. Now, while it might now seem that a heifer cow and a Victorian antique chifforobe have much in common; when it comes to an auction, Pattie says, some of the same principles apply.

• The key thing is to do your homework. First, know the price range an item of interest has been selling for in the market. “You want to set that price in your mind – if it is $200 or $300 because the auctioneers’ job to get as money as they can,” Pattie said. “They are going to try to get $410. It is a head game.”

• Always attend the preview or exhibition before the auction. “This is the time to turn the chair upside down and check the vase for cracks,” Pattie said. It is also useful to a few tools – a small flashlight, a magnifying glass and a black light.

Thom devoted a blog to this subject called “Tools of the Trade.”

• At the auction don’t be afraid to ask questions of the auction staff and even the auctioneer. “They are there to make a sale, so they want to help,” Pattie said.

• Listen carefully to get the auctioneer’s chant so you understand the dollar amounts. “The auctioneer’s chant has filler words between the dollar amounts and you may think he is asking for two hundred dollars and he is saying two thousand dollars,” Pattie said.

* Know how you are going to bid and don’t get rattled. The auctioneer will start at a higher price and then steadily drop it until the bidding starts. Some will start off with a higher bid to scare off the competition. Other will see how low the price drops, hoping to get a bargain. Some people wait until the last minute to jump into the bidding. “You are in a poker game,” Pattie said.

After a period in the 1970s where, Pattie said, “everyone was getting into the antique business” there has been a shakeout in the action business. As the competition has gotten keener, the number of auctions has fallen, but the quality of items offered has increased.

The foundation for all collecting, Pattie says, be it at auctions, antique shops or online – remains the same: knowledge.

“Furniture was my first love,” Pattie said, “but then I started to learn about American pottery, then art. It was a thirst.” That holds true for all of Worthpoint’s experts, Pattie said. “As a generalist I may not know everything, but I know where to look and what to look for,” he said, “while our specialists have devoted time to gather the knowledge of American lamps or antique dolls so that they can tell if a thread has been replaced.”

Wikipedia’s history of auctions

National auction List offer a roster of auctions around the country.

Auction Zip ia another site for tracking down auctions..